An administrative assistant supports a whole team rather than one executive, so hire for accuracy, systems fluency and follow-through. Run a short practical battery: tidy a messy spreadsheet, format a document to a template, draft a chasing email. Applicant volume is usually high, which makes structured screening far more valuable than another round of interviews.
General job boards produce plenty of applications, so the useful question is which additional channels raise quality. Community colleges and vocational programmes supply people trained in document handling and office systems. Career changers from retail, hospitality and call centres bring the customer-facing composure the job needs and usually learn the software quickly. People returning to work after a career break are consistently underrated and often stay for years. Temporary agencies deserve a look when you want to test fit before committing. Because the role is site-linked, keep advertising inside a sensible commute radius rather than paying for national reach nobody can act on. Publish the detailed [administrative assistant job description](/job-descriptions/administrative-assistant) with the real task list, since duty-free adverts full of adjectives attract the widest and weakest pool.
Tasks and tools, in that order. Say who the assistant supports, how many people, and what a typical week contains: diary coordination, expense processing, supplier orders, minutes, records, travel, onboarding logistics. Name the software they will use daily, because someone comfortable in spreadsheets and a document template system will self-select in while someone who is not will self-select out. State whether the role is onsite, the hours, and whether any evening or event support is expected. Describe where the job can lead, whether that is office management, operations coordination or team leadership. Skip the phrases every advert uses. Dynamic self-starter tells a candidate nothing, whereas the sentence about reconciling supplier invoices tells them exactly whether they want this job.
Filter mechanically before you filter by judgment. Two or three knockout questions about software fluency, availability and location remove a large share of applications honestly and quickly, and applicants prefer a fast no to silence. Read the application for accuracy rather than eloquence: typos, broken formatting and a cover note addressed to another company all predict the work you will get. Then run a timed practical battery of about thirty minutes, covering a spreadsheet clean-up, a formatting task against a template and a short email. Grade it against a rubric. Using [resume screening software](/resume-screening-software) to rank on the specific tool requirements keeps the shortlist honest when several hundred applications land in a fortnight.
Two stages, maximum. The practical battery does the real filtering, so the interview exists to check judgment and fit. Ask how they handle three people asking for something urgent at once, and listen for whether they negotiate deadlines or silently miss two of them. Ask what they changed in a previous role rather than what they were responsible for, because the difference between a good and an average administrator is noticing broken processes and fixing them. Include the team they will actually support, not only the hiring manager, and give a short tour so nobody accepts a job they have not seen. Draw the follow-up questions from a structured [administrative interview questions](/interview-questions/administrative-assistant) set so candidates are compared fairly.
It fills quickly in most markets, which is precisely the risk. High volume tempts hiring managers to shortcut the practical test and appoint whoever interviewed most confidently, and confident interviewing has almost no relationship to accurate work. Keep the battery even when you are in a hurry. Good [hiring software](/hiring-software) makes that manageable by handling the scheduling and scoring that usually get dropped under time pressure. Retention comes down to ownership and respect. Assistants leave when the role is an undefined dumping ground, when nobody explains why a task matters, and when there is no visible progression. Give them a domain they genuinely own, invest in the tools they use, and the tenure looks after itself.
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